All Quiet on the Western Front Essay | Critical Essay #3

All Quiet on the Western Front Critical Essay #3

In the following review, Matthews praises All Quiet on the Western Front as a gritty, true-to-life treatment of modern warfare and its effects upon humanity.

If a man has been in prison twenty years, and is then released, we should most of us agree that his life has been ruined. Not only have twenty years been taken away from him, but the bitterness of a special and futile knowledge will overshadow the rest of his days. But time, as we know (though none of us knows why), goes fast or slow according to what we are doing and where we find ourselves, and who shall say whether a few years in the trenches of the latest war might not have been the equivalent of at least twenty years in a peaceful jail?

In all the writing about the War which has the stamp of truth on It...
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